The cover bonus they have is broken as heck. You can just place them next to a dead cow and they will perform at ober level. I always thought the cover bonus they get should have been gained with vet.
This is how you make UKF unplayable in the early game.
Universal Carrier is pretty bad for what it costs imo. It wouldn't be so bad if its handling wasn't so terrible and it wasn't so vulnerable. For what it is, it can't be allowed to handle like a tank. It's just not viable. It's too weak health-wise and the time it takes for it to rotate is simply too long. So its health needs to be beefed up somehow here with a minimal impact to the fuel economy of UKF.
Yeah, I get that 210 MP is good for an early vehicle that can do a bit of damage and put some pressure on, but 15 fuel is a lot when you're struggling for map control and you have absolutely no ability to do anything without rushing tech + weapon upgrades.
In any case, the issues BartonPL brought up are key here. Snipers and the Armoured Car are virtually unstoppable. The only time I've beat that is when my opponent played incompetently and allowed me to flank his sniper. The designed counters to the Sniper I would assume would be the Universal Carrier, and in a sense it does function like that, but it's far too weak to manage it. It can't bypass enemy units to hunt a Sniper and expect to survive, it's too clumsy and vulnerable, and the likes of Grenadier will just murder it with a Faust and you've blown away 15 fuel for no visible gain.
On top of this, UKF have no soft-AT(Like the Faust) at all and can't handle the likes of the Armoured Car. The manpower bleed and the fact that their own early vehicle will blow up in the face of a stiff breeze mean that if OST is smart they can bully UKF for most of the early game with a Sniper/AC combo. If they really want to pen UKF in they can get an HMG as well which, again you'd presume the Universal Carrier is a counter for but that's 15 fuel and then 60 MU for the flamethrower upgrade and that's all you got. Flamethrower is ridiculously powerful and rightfully it'll be nerfed the next patch, but really that can't be done without a corresponding buff of some sort here that allows the UC to have survivability.
The PIAT is reasonable as a semi-deterrent if you manage to maintain competitiveness long enough to buy one, but really its accuracy is appallingly bad. Now having played CoH1 I expected that but in CoH1 the PIAT was at least able to hit stationary targets consistently, which is not something I've found here. So I can't even punish my opponents for lazy play without a large degree of luck.
With all that said I think more time needs to be taken and we need to see how things develop. This is just my initial impression.
If they want to contest map control seriously, UKF have major manpower problems as the game progresses - unless they're totally dominating the map in which case this is a matter of simply outplaying the opponent.
As for spamming, I personally haven't experienced a situation where I've had so much fuel I could spam a vehicle. Of course this is unsurprising for a few reasons; Again it's a matter of contesting the map. You need to invest in your early game - the Universal Carrier, Grenades, +1 Infantry Section member, weapon upgrades and so on are all somewhat fuel intensive, and then all the tech upgrades themselves. If you don't get them, you're compromising your map control which of course means fuel as well, and this is even worse on some maps.
In any case I think people need to wait a while before making definitive statements. Strategy doesn't develop over night, it needs extensive trial and error. The changes to UKF in the up coming patch look good in that they're hitting key problems but not are not really anything wide ranging. That flame thrower on the Universal Carrier was ridiculously strong, surprised it made it through testing. Had a lot of fun with it, though the second I used it I knew it was going to be nerfed.
Crowdsourced ideas are generally the way to go. Yeah, you get a lot of shit, but if you have the right people filtering it, it can be good.
But this will never happen and I'm surprised if anyone would seriously suggest it. There's no reason why someone would hawk off their own job to a bunch of unpaid people on the internet. Self-redundancy is just not a good move.
Additionally, presuming that wasn't a barrier, it patching shit costs money. Admittedly, I don't know how much, I'm assuming a significant portion goes into the cost of labour required for making patches in the first place(Cutting out the design side, we still need programmers to implement it) and then making use of the Steam servers to ship it(Which I'm assuming is significant, as otherwise Relic would be giving us rapid, small, incremental patches), you'd want to be sure what "the community" is proposing is a high quality, professional production. Can you really be sure of that? If I was the person pitching this, I wouldn't be able to say so.
So just have the developers look through the ideas and try them out themselves, that should curb any worries. Well, at that point isn't that basically the current set up, just with more transparency from the developer end? I wouldn't complain about that.
JohnnyB still roaming the forums with anti-communist propaganda again. Claiming that the Soviets committed all these crimes is just another way for Neo-Nazis to make less the crimes of Germany in WWII.
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